THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Hello Houston. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for being here.
(Applause.)

I want to thank all those who have spoken before and
all those who are here with us. I thank Congressman Gene Green
and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee -- how well they have
represented you. I am proud to work with them. I want to thank
Nick Lampson, who's running for Congress in the 9th District, and
I hope you'll help him get elected. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Hey folks, wait a minute, wait a
minute, wait a minute. I'm glad -- wait a minute, wait, wait.
I'm glad we've got some people from the other camp here. They
need to hear this. (Applause.)

And you know, when all you do -- wait a minute --
and you know, it's hard to hear when all you're doing is name
calling. And so, I want you do what I said at the Democratic
Convention. I want us to be respectful and polite and positive
and issue-oriented because there are some things I want everybody
in Texas to hear today. And I want you to help me say it.
(Applause.)

You know, I came right here to this park almost four
years ago, right at the end of the election. And I said that I
wanted to give this country back and its future back to ordinary
Americans. I said that I wanted us to go into the 21st century
with opportunity alive for everybody, with every citizen being
responsible and this country coming together, not being driven
apart by our differences. We should respect our differences,
build on them and understand it's our meal ticket to the future.
Just like the Mayor said, if we can learn to live and work
together, there is no stopping America and our best days are
still ahead. (Applause.)

Now, four years ago I had a tough time in Texas. I
mean the Democrats hadn't been winning the White House in a long
time, and then I looked up and both my opponents were from Texas.
(Laughter.) It hardly seemed fair. And here you were, the
biggest state in -- the second biggest state in the country,
representing so much of the future, and I know I'd spent more
time in Texas than anybody else running over the last 40 years.
And I had to run against two people from Texas. (Laughter.)
Well, that's not a handicap anymore, and I don't have any excuse.
But neither do you. (Applause.)

So why don't we just think about where we've come
from and where we're going. Four years ago this country had high
unemployment, 20 years of stagnant wages, increasing inequality
among working people. The crime rate was going up. The welfare
rolls were going up. Public cynicism was going up because we
despaired that we could make any difference; that what our
leaders in Washington did would make any difference to people
here at home, wherever home was in America.

Well, four years can make a lot of difference. And
I appreciate what Congressman Green and Congresswoman Sheila
Jackson Lee said. I especially appreciate what the Mayor said
about the work we've done together. But let me tell you what
happened to me when I was in Longview this morning. We had
13,000 people in Longview this morning. It as great,
unbelievable. (Applause.) And I ran into three people, just
walking down the -- like I always do, after I talked I went down
the line and shook hands with people. And I ran into three
people -- they weren't holding my signs or the other party's
signs. They weren't holding -- they were just people there. But
I want to tell you who they were.

I met a man who was a Vietnam veteran, with his wife
and his child. And his child has spina bifida, has had 12
operations. That man and his child at long last, because of a
bill I signed yesterday, are finally going to get the medical
attention and the disability support they need. (Applause.)

And then, I went down the line a little ways and I
met a lady who said, I'm a 34-year-old single mother of two
children, and I'm a graduate of Americorps; I work for my
community, and now I'm paying my way through the college here to
start a better life and give my kids a better life. (Applause.)

And then I went on down a little more and I met a
lady who was really crying. She was so -- I didn't know what was
the matter, she was obviously disturbed. And she said, I'm sorry
that I'm emotional, but because of the Family and Medical Leave
law, I was able to take a little time off from work when my
husband was so sick with cancer and I didn't lose my job, and it
made a big difference to our life and our family. (Applause.)

I say this to point out that too many times over the
last several years our politics in Washington have been more
about hot air than concrete action to change the lives of the
American people for the better. And I was determined when I went
to Washington to replace the politics of finger-pointing and
asking who's to blame with the politics of saying, what can we do
to make this country a better place? What can we do to work
together? What can we do to build a better future for our
children?

And I come here to tell you today we're in better
shape than we were four years ago and we're on the right track
for the 21st century. (Applause.)

You know, I couldn't help but think about a lot of
things that have been said over the last four years. I remember
that Mr. Morales' opponent once said that if the President's
economic plan passes in 1993, the deficit will go up and
unemployment will go up, and it will throw us into a recession;
it's a terrible, terrible idea. And a lot of people believed
him, and it took a while before we could tell, you know. But now
we know. (Applause.) Now we know.

So here's the report on what they all voted against.
Four years later, 10.5 million new jobs; a record number of new
small businesses; record exports of America's goods and services;
the highest rate of homeownership in 15 years; 4.5 million new
homeowners; every small business in the country eligible for a
tax cut when they invest more in their business if they buy their
own health insurance, easier for them to take our retirement
plans. (Applause.)

And yesterday, the Census Report which comes out
every year at this time -- a totally non-political document --
tells us how we're doing. Here's what the Census Report of the
United States said yesterday. It said that in 1995 median income
-- that is the families in the middle -- increased on average
almost $900 after inflation over '94, the biggest increase for
ordinary Americans in 10 years. (Applause.) It said that since
that economic plan passed, the increase was over $1,600 in the
pockets of ordinary Americans. It said that we had the biggest
decrease in child poverty in one year in 20 years in 1995.
(Applause.) It said that we had the biggest decrease in
inequality among working American families in 27 years.
(Applause.) It said that we had the biggest reduction in the
number of people living in poverty -- most of them working, I
might add -- in 27 years. (Applause.) It said that we had the
biggest drop recorded to the lowest levels ever -- listen to this
-- since they have been keeping these statistics, that the
poverty rate among African Americans and American senior citizens
had reached its lowest level in recorded history.

We are on the right track, folks, to the 21st
century. Don't let anybody kid you about that. We are moving in
the right direction. (Applause.)

As Congressman Green said, on October 1st, 10
million Americans will get an increase in their minimum wage.
(Applause.) And let me tell you what else that bill does: it
gives a $5,000 tax credit to anyone who will adopt a child.
There's a lot of kids out there that need a good home, and this
will help. (Applause.)

Thanks to the leadership of people like the Mayor of
Houston, the crime rate in the United States has dropped for four
straight years in a row. And our crime bill is putting 100,000
police on the street and helping to support the decline in crime.
And we ought to finish it.

Now, let me say one other thing. Mr. Lampson's
opponent and a lot of other people made a lot of headway four
years ago, going out to Texans and to people in my home state and
around the country saying, well, that fool President's trying to
take your gun away. That's what that Brady Bill's all about.
That's what that assault weapons ban's all about. He wants to
take your gun away. He's going to interfere with your 2nd
Amendment rights. And you know, no one knew in 1994, and it was
pretty scary.

But now we know. And you know something -- it
turned out we told the truth. That bill protected 650 different
kinds of hunting and sporting weapons. Not a single hunter in
Texas -- not a one -- lost a rifle. But 60,000 felons, fugitives
and stalkers could not get handguns because of the Brady Bill.
(Applause.) We were right and they were wrong. (Applause.) And
now we know. We're on the right track to the 21st century.
(Applause.)

The welfare rolls are down almost 2 million. Child
support collections are up almost 50 percent -- by $3.8 billion.
That's why people can get off welfare -- if their children are
supported by their parents. (Applause.) Our environment is
cleaner -- our water, our air, our food. We're making progress
in public health and the environment. We cleaned up more toxic
waste dumps in three years than our opponents did in 12. We are
moving in the right direction.

And I came here to ask you to help me build that
bridge to the 21st century. Will you do it? Will you do it?
(Applause.)

AUDIENCE: Yesss!

THE PRESIDENT: Now folks, I want --

AUDIENCE: Four more years! Four more years! Four
more years!

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you.

Now listen, we've got just 39 days left -- 39 days
for every one of you to find some time to talk your friends and
neighbors and family members, other folks who work with you and
live with you in Texas, people you know beyond the state borders.
And I want you to talk to them about the bridge to the 21st
century we have to build. There are three or four big ideas in
this election. Do you think we ought to build a bridge to the
future or can we build a bridge to the past?

AUDIENCE: Nooo!

THE PRESIDENT: Do you believe that you're better
off on your own, or do you think the First Lady's right, it does
take a village to raise our children and to build a great city,
to build a great state, to build a great nation -- (applause)
--all of us working together? Do you believe our best days are
behind us or our best days ahead of us?

AUDIENCE: Yesss!

THE PRESIDENT: That is what you have to decide.

Folks, we have to -- first of all, we've got to keep
this economy growing. That means we have to balance the budget
because that keeps interest rates down. All the experts tell me
not to talk about that. They said, you go out in rally, you'll
bore people to death if you talk about balancing the budget. But
let me tell you something. Our opponents on the other side, they
talk about how conservative they are. We have reduced the
deficit four years in a row. You know when the last time that
happened was? You know when it happened -- in the 1840s, before
the Civil War. Don't tell me about conservative. Don't tell me
about that. (Applause.) We reduced the size of the government,
the number of government regulations and killed more ineffective
and outdated programs than they ever did. Don't tell me about
being conservative.

But I'll tell you something, I think we ought to
have enough government left to help people get an education, to
protect our environment, to take care of the elderly with
Medicare and to build this country and move it forward.
(Applause.) And I think you do, too. I think you do, too.
(Applause.)

So, yes, balance the budget. But do it without
wrecking Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. And
do it without wrecking our commitment to the future. We have to
invest in research and technology.

Just before I came here, I went out to welcome
Shannon Lucid back to Houston from space. (Applause.) And I was
given a note before I welcomed her that said when she was a
little girl, she told someone that she wanted to be a rocket
scientist and an adult said to her, there's no such thing, and if
there were, it wouldn't be a woman.

AUDIENCE: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me tell you something. My
little girl and little girls all over America and not so little
girls, they think Shannon Lucid's pretty great. (Applause.) And
they think -- and a lot of little boys do, too. (Applause.) And
the point is that she is doing something that we could not have
imagined just a few years ago. And these kids in this audience
today -- and all of you who brought your children, I want to
thank you and all of you young people that came on your own, I
want to thank you. (Applause.) But our commitment to the space
program is one example of the fact that we are going to solve
problems, climb mountains and push back boundaries in ways that
we cannot even imagine. You young people will be doing work that
hasn't been invented yet, often that hasn't been imagined yet.

Let me just give you just a couple of examples.
Number one, we have more than doubled the life expectancy of
people with the HIV infection in only four years with medical
research. (Applause.) Number two -- I'll give you another
example. A lot of you were very moved by what Christopher Reeve
said at our Democratic Convention about the importance of medical
research. He's so brave, so powerful. Just a few days before he
made that speech it was revealed that for the first time ever in
laboratory animals with severed spines had movement in their
lower limbs because of nerve transplants to those spines. Who
knows what we can do to give people their mobility back, to give
people their future back. Who knows? We have to keep fighting
for that. We have to keep fighting for that. (Applause.)

Third example: The United States just issued into a
joint venture with IBM to build a supercomputer that will do more
calculations in one second than you can do on your hand-held
calculator at home in 30,000 years. That is the future and I'm
determined to see that we keep investing in that future so every
one of these kids will have a place in it. (Applause.)

And let me say this: We can have a tax cut. But it
ought to be a tax cut that is targeted to folks who need it and
targeted to the purposes that will help our country most -- to
raising children, to getting people a college education, to
paying for health care in the first home and to making sure
people don't have to pay a tax on their home when they sell it,
because often that's the only savings they've got in life.
That's the kind of tax cut we can afford and we ought to have the
one we can afford, but we shouldn't have one we can't afford.
You don't want to go back and run up this deficit again.

One things our friends in the other party said last
year that I agree with -- they were absolutely right and I hate
to see them change their position -- last year they said, if
we're not on a plan to a balanced budget it will add two percent
to our interest rates. Now, I want you to go home and think
about this tonight. What would it mean to you if you had two
percent on your car payment, two percent on your credit card
payment, two percent on your home mortgage, two percent on your
student loan? What would it mean to the economy of Houston and
Texas is every business person had to pay two percent more to
borrow money? It would mean fewer jobs, slower growth, fewer pay
raises. It would take us right back where we were. We do not
want to go back, we want to go forward, build a bridge to the
21st century. (Applause.)

And I want to ask you to help me build a bridge to
the 21st century that will give world-class education to all of
our children. And I hope you will do that. (Applause.)

First thing I want to say is, we've got a lot of
great educational opportunities in this country, but 40 percent
of the 8-year-olds in America can't even read a book by
themselves yet. And I want to mobilize an army of volunteers,
through Americorps, through senior citizens, through reading
specialists, to go out and work with parents and teachers so that
by the year 2000 every 8-year-old in America can pick up a book
and say, "I can read this all by myself." And I want you to help
me do that. (Applause.)

I want us to connect every classroom and library and
every school in America to the Information Superhighway. You
know why? A lot of you are older like me and aren't great with
computers; let me tell you in plain language what that means. If
we put the computers, the software, the teachers out there who
understand it, and then we hook it up to all these information
networks, what that means is, for the first time in the history
of America the kids in the poorest inner-city schools, the kids
in the remotest rural schools in West Texas and North Dakota and
you name it will have access to the same information at the same
level of quality in the same time as the children in the richest
schools, public or private, in the United States do. It will
revolutionize education. We can do that if you'll help. We can
do that. (Applause.)

Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st
century? (Applause.)

Let me say this: Most of us are going to have to
face the fact that education is a lifetime endeavor. More and
more the average age of people going to college is higher and
higher. More and more, when people lose a job, they got to go
back to school and get training if they want to get a better job
instead of a worse one. We have got to make the doors of college
open to every single American who is willing to work hard to be a
good student. That ought to be the only criterion. (Applause.)

And I want to do three things. Number one, I want
more families to be able to save in an IRA, an individual
retirement account, save for their retirement account, but take
it out without any taxes if they're using the money to pay for
education. (Applause.)

Number two, in four years I want at least two years
of education after high school, a community college degree, to be
as universal in America as a high school diploma is today.
(Applause.) And it will be easy to do. This is not complicated.
Nearly every American lives within driving distance of a good
community college. And they work or they'd go out of business.
They're great institutions.

What we propose to do is to let you take off your
tax bill dollar for dollar the tuition cost at the typical
community college for two years, so that every American of any
age can go. And we can pay for it in the balanced budget.
(Applause.)

And finally, in this great city with great higher
education facilities and great medical facilities, I believe we
ought to give the American taxpayers a deduction of up to $10,000
a year for the tuition cost of any education after high school at
any age. (Applause.) And I want you to help me deliver that.
(Applause.)

There's a lot more we have to do, folks. We need to
keep supporting people like your Mayor here, and finish the job
of putting 100,000 police on the street. We need to keep
supporting community antidrug activities and antigang activities
like the Safe and Drug-Free Schools program that I fought so hard
for and that we stopped this Congress from gutting when they
tried to do it. We need to keep doing that. (Applause.)

We've got to keep working -- and I have a plan to
help the cities and the private sector create 1 million jobs to
help the new welfare reform law succeed. Let me say this: That
new law says something quite simple and straightforward. And
it's controversial, but I want you to know why I believe it's the
right thing to do. It says the federal government will continue
to guarantee to poor families medical care and nutrition, and if
the person takes a job, more money on child care than ever
before. But we're going to give what used to be in that check to
the states, and eventually to the local community workers, and
they have to figure out how to turn that welfare check into a
paycheck for every able-bodied person within two years.

That means that everybody in Houston, Texas, that
ever cussed the welfare system has now got an obligation to say,
what can I do to help these people go to work? Because we want
people to succeed at home and at work. That's what we want for
poor families, what we want for working families. And I intend
to help, and I want you to help. I want you to help.
(Applause.)

We've got to keep working to help our families
succeed at home and at work. Anywhere I go in America, the
number one thing I hear from families is that every working
family, whether they're modest income, middle income, even upper
income working families, nearly every family I talk to with
children can cite one or two traumatic examples in their lives
when they've had a real conflict between their jobs and their job
at home of raising their children. I say we want to build a
bridge to the 21st century where Americans can succeed with their
children -- their most important work -- and at their jobs. And
that's what this whole policy is all about. (Applause.)

That's why I think -- that's why, with all respect
to the folks who are here, I think we were right and they were
wrong when I signed the Family and Medical Leave law.
(Applause.) Now, what they said -- what they said was, if you
pass this Family and Medical Leave law, it will be terrible for
business. All the law said is, if your business has 50 or more
employees, an employee can have a little time off when there's a
baby born, or a sick parent, or a sick child, without being
fired. That's all it said.

Now, three years later, now we know -- 12 million
families have taken some time off, and during that time we've got
10.5 million more jobs, and a record number of new small
businesses every year. We can protect work and family in America
and build this country together. (Applause.)

I believe we can improve our environment, not just
protect it, and grow the economy. And I want to tell you that in
spite of what I said before about toxic waste sites, there are
still 10 million American children living within four miles of a
toxic waste dump -- 10 million of them. But if you'll give us
four more years, we'll clean up the 500 worst dumps and our kids
will be growing up next to parks, not poison.

Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st
century? (Applause.) Will you do that? (Applause.)

Let me make one last comment. A big part of
building our bridge is how we relate to the rest of the world and
how we relate to each other. I'm proud of the fact that this
country is a safer country than it was. The nuclear threat has
been diminished. We have been a force for peace. We have
strengthened our efforts against terrorism. We have dramatically
expanded trade. But we have to fact the fact that we are going
to live in a global society where no matter where you live, we
can transfer ideas, information, money, technology, across the
borders of nations in a split second.

Now, if you think about that kind of world, there is
no nation as well-positioned as the United States to do well.
Why? Well, look around this crowd today -- because we all come
from somewhere else. Everybody but the Native Americans all come
from somewhere else -- everybody. (Applause.)

When I welcomed the Olympic teams to Atlanta there
were teams from 197 different national groups. The largest
county in America, Los Angeles County, has people from 150 of
those places in one of our counties. (Applause.) When I looked
at the American Olympic team it occurred to me that if they took
their uniforms off we wouldn't know where they're from.
(Laughter.) They could be from China, they could be from Japan,
they could be from India, they could be from Pakistan, they could
be from the Middle East, they could be from the Nordic countries,
they could be from Europe, they could be from Latin America, they
could be from anywhere. That's America.

This is not a country based on race, ethnicity or
specific religious convictions. This is a country which has said
for over 200 years, if you believe in the Declaration of
Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of this
country, you're our kind of person; all you've got to do is show
up tomorrow and behave and we'll build a bridge you can walk
across into the 21st century. (Applause.)

Now, you have to ask yourself, do you believe that?
AUDIENCE: Yes!!
THE PRESIDENT: Will you help us build that kind of

bridge?

AUDIENCE: Yes!!

THE PRESIDENT: Do you believe our best days are
still ahead?

AUDIENCE: Yes!!

THE PRESIDENT: Then for 39 days go out and tell it
to other people and we'll have a great victory in Texas and in
America. Thank you and God bless you. Thank you. (Applause.)